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NOW
& UPCOMING La
MaMa La Galleria presents Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks
in
WHERE
AND WHEN La MaMa's Galleria, 6 East First Street, will present Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks in a new performance/installation fusion work, "Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral Border," from July 11 to 14, 2013. "Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota Endless Peripheral Border" is a collaborative work between the dancers of Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks, daguerreotype artist Takashi Arai (Daguerreotype is the 1830s photo process in which a direct positive is made in the camera on a silvered copper plate) and video artist Kit Fitzgerald. The performance is staged as a multi-disciplinary work within an installation. Yoshiko Chuma and members of The School of Hard Knocks International, including Rebeca Medina, Coque Salcedo, Mina Nishimura, Tatyana Tenenbaum and Felipe Gomez Ossa, will create choreography based on the process of daguerreotype making. A description of that process is contained in Chuma's blog, "Daguerreotype: Mirror with a Memory 2013-2015." Yoshiko Chuma has been traveling widely, documenting artistic expeditions to Ramallah, Fukushima and Bogota, where she has collaborated with local troupes on performance works that investigate, among others, themes of not being able to return home. She is currently engaged in a series of works, under the common rubric "Daguerreotype: Mirror with a Memory," in which she intentionally confuses documentation with history. Chuma creates fictional fables of alienation and diaspora by multi-layering choreography with texts, images, filmed interviews, moving sculptures and video footage that she has collected over her artistic career. She refers to them, metaphorically, as "framing theater with barbed wire." This performance will be built as an installation with live dance components in a series of scenes that draw the audience into the space from various viewpoints. Live music will be provided by Aska Kaneko, a violinist, with composition by Christopher McIntyre. Elements will include aspects of Colombian mythology, dances that were created in Ramallah, and the seven-step process of daguerreotype photography that will be abstracted into movement vocabulary. Works by Takashi Arai (daguerreotype), Kit Fitzgerald (digital paintings), Robert Flynt (photography), Dona Ann McAdams (photography), Hugh Burckhardt (photography), and Gabriel Berry (artwork) will be exhibited and will be part of the stage set for the performance installation. Backstage processes will be transparent to the audience. The stage manager, costume designer and video/sound operators will be revealed on stage so that the audience can experience a multi-dimensional performance process as if they are observing it in a laboratory. Each performance starts with Takashi Arai making a daguerreotype of an audience member that he has selected. The performance installation will be performed each evening, from July 11 to 14, at 7:30. Tickets for July 12-14 are $15. The July 11 performance will contain an opening night party with salsa dancing following the production; tickets for that night are $20. The La MaMa box office is reachable at (212) 475-7710 and tickets can be purchased online at www.lamama.org. Much of Yoshiko Chuma's work is evolutionary, as is "Pi=3.14...Ramallah-Fukushima-Bogota
Endless Peripheral Border." It has roots in a dance work named
"Pi=3.14" that was created by Yoshiko Chuma for The Club
at La MaMa in 2002. That piece was based on a mountain of correspondence
and miscommunications between The School of Hard Knocks and people
in Hiroshima, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Kabul. |
